Tony Fabre’s 2005 Violon d’Ingres gets its name from a 1924 Man Ray image of Kiki seen nude from behind with a cello’s sound holes in her back: woman as instrument on which man plays. Fabre says he took his inspiration “from some compositions for string by Paganini, Bach, Vivaldi, imagining the bodies of the dancers as the strings of a violin, a cello, a viola.” His string orchestra is tuning up as the curtain rises to find the dancers writhing on a bench. The jagged idea that Rachmaninov used for his Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini dominates the early going, which is marked by the usual couplings and uncouplings and a whimsical bit of voyeurism (a woman hiding under the bench and watching). Grieg, Fabre’s father’s favorite composer (on its previous visit, in 2004, CND2 danced Fabre’s Aus Holbergs Zeit), contributes Anitra’s Dance from his incidental music for Peer Gynt; Kenji Matsuyama becomes an on-stage triangle player, complete with music stand, but at the end of the section he goes triangle crazy and they have to take it away from him. Violon d’Ingres ends as it began, writhing and tuning up. Like Remansos, it’s playful, light, perhaps not as light as it looks.
Duato’s 1990 Rassemblement is a political number in the vein of his Na floresta (rain forests) and Coming Together (Attica); here the subject is human rights in Haiti. The music is Toto Bissainthe’s Rasanbleman; the costumes are the country-peasant clothes of Duato’s Jardí tancat and Arenal rather than the dancewear of Remansos and Violon d’Ingres. The focal figure, Jonatan de Luis Mazagatos, goes to sleep amid the dancing, and when he wakes up, he shows the wary instinct of a hunted animal. To no avail, it would seem, since two men in black appear to torture and murder him, but the rassemblement of the community suffices to resurrect him, after which the stirring call of “Liberté” rings out.
EMANUEL GAT DANCE: Stravinsky’s Sacre got turned into casino rueda salsa. |
The weekend’s two screenings of Ballets Russes (invaluable, and now on DVD) were introduced by former Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo principal Frederick Franklin, at 92 as quick with a quip as he is fast on his feet, and making his first appearance at the Pillow in 42 years. “We were in the covered wagons of ballet,” he explains of the two companies’ American tours. (The other Ballet Russe was the “Original Ballet Russe.”) Actually, everyone is spry of thought. Irina Baronova, the youngest of Balanchine’s babies, remembers, “It was more fun in the factory yard climbing trees and throwing stones at one another,” but she became a dancer anyway. George Zoritch wasn’t impressed with Agnes de Mille: “Anyone who’s not bedridden could be in Rodeo,” he says in a sentence without a mean syllable. What emerges from the archive footage is the individuality and personality the dancers command; there’s nothing like it this side of Suzanne Farrell.Farrell herself underlined the point at the Pillow last weekend when she said, “You want to be fascinating before you’ve even done anything.” Her Suzanne Farrell Ballet was making its Pillow debut in a Balanchine program (Marcia B. Siegel’s review is here), and in her Pillow Talk she was her usual combination of disarming honesty (“I see many things that if I were still dancing I would steal”) and disarming wit (“Everything [now] is videotaped,” making goo-goo eyes at the Pillow’s video camera). In the Doris Duke Studio Theatre, Israel’s Emanuel Gat Dance — another baby company, formed in 2004 — performed Winter Voyage (to “Der Lindenbaum,” “Wasserflut,” and “Der Leiermann,” from Schubert’s Winterreise, plus silences) and The Rite of Spring (to the Stravinsky score). Gat and Roy Assaf danced Winter Voyage barefoot in shaved heads and sleeveless ankle-length silver-gray tunics slit to the hip over black trousers. The parallel and shadow movement reminded us that Schubert’s masterpiece is fixated on the lover, not the beloved. Is he obsessed with his feelings? Himself? Do we feel an auto-erotic Schubertian current when, at the end, Assaf and Gat return downstage to face us, side by side?
